A supermassive black hole tears up a star in a tidal disruption event, pulling gas away and creating an accretion disk. Credit: Ralf Crawford illustration When a star strays too close to a ...

Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics collaborated to publish a paper on a star’s spaghettification, the process in which a star is ripped apart by a black hole, last Monday.

This illustration depicts a star experiencing spaghettification as it’s sucked in by a supermassive black hole. Credit: ESO / M. Kornmesser Spaghettification sounds like a particularly unpleasant ...

It’s a popular misconception that black holes behave like cosmic vacuum cleaners, ravenously sucking up any matter in their surroundings. In reality, only stuff that passes beyond the event ...

Astronomers have spotted a rare and radiant pulse of light—the last gasp of a dying star that has been sucked toward the center of a supermassive black hole and shredded into sinuous strings of ...